The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking eBook

In France the pot-au-feu, or soup-pot, simmers
in every peasant or middle-class home, and is not
to be despised even in richer ones. In this dish,
a small portion of meat is cooked so judiciously as
to flavor a large mass of vegetables and broth; and
this, served with salad and oil and bread, forms a
meal which can hardly be surpassed in its power of
making the most of every constituent offered.
In Germany soups are a national dish also; but their
extreme fondness for pork, especially raw ham and
sausage, is the source of many diseases. Sweden,
Norway, Russia,—­all the far northern countries,—­tend
more and more to the oily diet of the Esquimaux, fish
being a large part of it. There is no room for
other illustrations; but, as you learn the properties
of food, you will be able to read national dietaries,
from the Jewish down, with a new understanding of
what power food had and has in forming national peculiarities.

It is settled, then, that to renew our muscles which
are constantly wearing out, we must eat the food containing
the same constituents; and these we find in meat,
milk, eggs, and the entire gluten of grains, &c, as
in wheaten-grits or oatmeal.

Fat and heat must come to us from the starches and
sugars, in sufficient supply to “put a layer
of wadding between muscles and skin, fill out the
wrinkles, and keep one warm.” To find out
the proportion needed for one’s own individual
constitution, is the first work for all of us.
The laborer requires one thing, the growing child
another, the man or woman whose labor is purely intellectual
another; and to understand how best to meet these
needs, demands a knowledge to which most of us have
been indifferent. If there is excess or lack
of any necessary element, that excess or lack means
disease, and for such disease we are wholly responsible.
Food is not the only and the universal elixir of life;
for weak or poor blood is often an inheritance, and
comes to one tainted by family diseases, or by defects
in air or climate in general. But, even when
outward conditions are most disastrous, perfect food
has power to avert or alter their effects; and the
child who begins life burdened with scrofulous or
other diseases, and grows to a pale, weak, unwholesome
youth, and either a swift passing into the next world,
or a life here of hopeless invalidism, can, nine times
out of ten, have this course of things stopped by
scientific understanding of what foods are necessary
for such conditions.

I propose to take the life of one who from babyhood
up has been fed on the best food, perfectly prepared,
and to give the tables of such food for different
periods in that life, allowing only such digression
as will show the effects of an opposite course of
treatment; thus showing the relations of food to health,—­a
more necessary and vital form of knowledge than any
other that the world owns.